BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: HECHOS HISTÓRICOS

*(Lectures/ Personal Research)

1. The British Isles

British Isles (the number of Great Britain and Ireland
islands):

Two Sovereign States (political Republic of Ireland (Éire)

organisation): United Kingdom (UK)

Four Countries/Nation in the UK: England, Northern Ireland(Ulster), Scotland, Wales

‘Britain’ general term for the big island: UK or Great Britain

*Nation(community, people), country(territory), state(political view)

2. History of English Language

English born in England, so we are going to focus on England’s history. Old English is very
different to Actual English. Language changes gradually and slowly. Four eras:
Old English or Middle English Early Modern Modern English
Anglo-Saxon (410 to (1150s to 1470s) English (1470s to (from 1650s...)
1066) * 1650s)

410. Germanic invasions 1390. The Canterbury 1597. Shakespeare 1755. A dictionary of the
597. St Augustine tales (Chaucer) 1607. 1st settlement in English Language

886. The Danelaw 1473. Printing press N.America 1857. Oxford English
(Caxton) 1611. King James Dictionary
1066. Battle of Hastings
Version 1991. 1st e-mail

*Anglo-Norman(1066 to 1150): different people with different languages, which “disappear” officially, not for
people. Anglo-Norman is explained like a different language (like Latin to us). At school, students learn from Middle
English, but less than a century this changes. Because of using different point of view, because of specialists. Specialists in
medieval languages made a difference: Anglo-Saxon is not a different language, it’s Old English, the original English. (One
of them was JRR. Tolkien)

3. The family tree for English

As humans we need language. We need to communicate, through that language we spread out
our culture. Our culture and history lives in the words we speak and hear. We grow as
individuals in a specific community. But also we are part of that community, Are you aware
of your community? which is our community? who are we? We can answer this in differents
ways depending on the point of view. When do you feel european/andalusian/spanish…?
We have white skin but this fact is invisible for us when we don’t have other community to
compare us. We need to belong to a group in order to compare with those who are different
from us. So who are we? Our individual experiences, but no the language.
 THE MAIN INFLUENCES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF
THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
1. Prehistory-500 → Before English
2. 500-1100→ Establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Old English or Anglo-Saxon)
3. 1100-1500→ Middle English (Norman Conquest)
4. 1500-1800→ Early Modern English
5. 1800-Present→ Late Modern English and English today

1. Prehistory-500 → Before English

The beginnings of European language developed in India and travelled north. These Indo-European
languages became distinct as peoples divided across Europe and culminated in the Celtic in ancient
Britain. The word FATHER (English) is VATER (German) and PATER (Latin) they are cognates
(similar words in different languages that share the same root).

These Indo-European family is wide, so we are going to focus on:

Romance L. Celtic people were governed by Romans until Hadrian’s Wall, which marked off Roman
Empire and some celtic people move on France and Spain (Galicia) because of Romans.

When the Fall of the Roman Empire came: ‘civilians’, disappear and Germanic migration
‘barbarians’, came.

Germanic. was the common language in Elve river about 3.000 years ago. It splits into:
- East G. who migrated back to South-Eastern Europe (✞)
- North G. modern Scandinavian language: Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic (but no
Finnish, because it is not an Indo-European Language.
- West G. the ancestor of modern: German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian and ENGLISH!!!!!!!!!
2. 500-1100→ Establishment of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (Old English or Anglo-
Saxon)
In 5th and 6th centuries, actual England consisted in 7 main kingdoms, a heptarchy -Northumbria,
Mercia, East Anglia, Wessex (West), Essex (East), Sussex (South) and Kent-, where a little influence
from Celts or Romans (British Celtic, Common Brittonic, Latin) occurred.

Germanic invasions. Beginning of English

West G. invaders from Jutland and Southern Denmark: Angles, Saxons and Jutes began populating
the British Isles creating a
new empire.
- They speak
Anglo-saxon,
which became
the common
language→ Old
English. (you can
see that is the same
language comparing
The Lord’s Prayer)
Because of that, 4 major
dialects emerged:
Northumbrian, Mercian,
West Saxon and Kentish.
*Nota: English is based on
Mercian dialect
- They pushed the original (Celtic-speakers) to Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Ireland (some
Gaelic language survive today).

The Coming of Christianity and Literacy (during 7th century)

Saint Augustine, 597. Missionary came to England to christianisation (converter). When the king
converter himself, the whole kingdom did the same.
Latin alphabet (Synod of Whitby, 664). Church made a big influence in the alphabet. So Latin
alphabet is adopted.
* Note: Thorn letter, which exists today in Iceland, but not in English which is /th/

Viking (=Danes) invasions and Danish settlers ( 9th - 11th)

Around 700, Some robbing and came back to their lands but
many vikings didn’t come back, so they became permanent
enemies, who brought many North Germanic words (dream).
Because of them, the island was divided in half with a tread:
The Danelaw (880-937): was a piece tread between Alfred and
a viking: they accept peace dividing the territory. It was the
territory under Viking’s control (Saxons: South; Danes: North,
who spoked Old Norse).
Families were united, because of marriages between neighbors, mixing Old Norse with Old English
(Ex of Old Norse words: freckle, leg, root).
Cnut (995-1035): In order to see the importance of vikings in the history of English language, we can
talk about Cnut, king of England and many others territories (Norway and Denmark), but he was a
viking.
Normandy, was a territory in where actual is France, a viking got an agreement with the king of
“France” and they stayed there, so that their language was a romance language because “France” was
in the holy roman empire.

Gradual unification of England (9th-11th centuries)

In the early 10th century, Æthelstan conquered Northumbria and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were united,
England became a unified kingdom for the first time (Before him, his grandfather, Alfred the Great, was the king
of Wessex, so West Saxon becomes the standard for government).

In 1016, the kingdom became part of the North Sea Empire of Cnut the Great, a personal union
between England, Denmark and Norway.

Best-known surviving example of Old English is the poem Beowulf: a hero of the Geats.

3. 1100-1500→ Middle English (Norman Conquest)

Norman Conquest has a graphical depiction in ‘The Bayeux Tapestry’.

The event that began the transition from Old English to Middle English was the Norman Conquest of
1066, when William the Conqueror (Duke of Normandy and, later, William I of England) invaded the island of
Britain from his home base in northern France, and settled in his new acquisition along with his
nobles and court. William crushed the opposition with a brutal hand and deprived the Anglo-Saxon
earls of their property, distributing it to Normans (and some English) who supported him. He
conquering Normans were themselves descended from Vikings who had settled in northern France
about 200 years before (norman = Norseman).

The Normans spoke a rural dialect of French with considerable Germanic influences, usually called
Anglo-Norman (French dialect with Germanic influences in addition to he basic Latin roots) ‘French’
becomes the language of the law aristocracy and power (council, marriage, govern). Just religion is served
by Latin while the common man speaks Old English. But know, there was a wholesale infusion
of Romance words. Society still speak Old English → which had to adapted (using French/Latin
words).

A hundred years war (1337-1450) between English and French makes French the language of the
enemy. In 1362, Statute of Pleading was adopted, which made English the language of the courts and
it began to be used in Parliament.

Best-known surviving example of Middle English in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

4. 1500-1800→ Early Modern English

Renaissance. England is open to the continent. Ideas coming in. The revival of classical scholarship
brought many classical Latin and Greek words into the language.

Great Vowel Shift (GVS). 1400-1700. The pronunciation changes completely. (look at the ‘esquema-
dibujo’). Modern English speakers can read Chaucer with difficulty, Chaucer’s pronunciation would
have been completely unintelligible to the modern ear. Shakespeare, on the other hand, would be
accented, but understandable. This happened because of the population movement: migrations inside
England. The major changes occurring within a century and it’s not over. Ex: Chaucer’s LYF /li:f/
became the modern word LIFE.

Caxton-printing press (1473). The spelling and grammar are fixed. Publishing in English. The
dialect of London, where most publishing houses were located, became the standard, and the first
English dictionary was published in 1604.

William Shakespeare (1546), The Bard of Avon. Shakespeare are often shocked at the number of
clichés contained in his plays, until they realize that he coined them and they became clichés
afterwards. He wrote in Modern English and still today: flesh and blood; critical, pedant)

King James Bible (1611). The word of god was in Latin, but King James could translated it in
English.

American English (around 1600). The English colonization of North America occurred and the
subsequent creation of a distinct American dialect. In certain aspects, closer to Shakespearean English
than the Modern English (fall, rubbish). New words came:
-Place names like Mississippi or things from there like tomato, savanna.
-Spanish words (from American west) like armadillo or mustang.
-West African (slaves): gumbo.

5. 1800-Present→ Late Modern English and English today

Industrial revolution and Colonialism
Pronunciation, grammar and spelling are largely the same, but this period accumulated many more
words as a result of two main historical factors:
- The Industrial Revolution, which necessitated new words for things and ideas that had not
previously existed
- The rise of the British Empire, during which time English adopted many foreign words and
made them its own. No single one of the socio-cultural developments of the 19th Century
could have established English as a world language, but together they did just that. Most of
the innovations of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th Century were of
British origin (electricity, the telegraph, the telephone...)

Technology
From emails to SMS texting and the Internet, typing gained a new boost and new acronyms and words
were born. The English language now has words taken or derived from over 350 languages.